📸: Freakout Festival | Pearl Charles
December 8 – 24
No one would classify the Christmas shows I’ve recommended this season as “normal”—who would want that?—but The Dina Martina Christmas Show likely takes the holiday fruitcake in WTFness. Even 25 years into its run, the show still surprises with its sheer off-kilter, off-key, off-the-wall bizarreness. Provincetown Magazine calls it “chaos drag,” while Out In New Jersey describes Dina as having “the grace of a giraffe slipping down a water slide.” For people in need of something…let’s broadly say “non-traditional”…it’s time to slap on some big red lipstick and get on down to ACT Theatre.
The self-proclaimed Second Lady of Entertainment, “tragic singer, horrible dancer, and surreal raconteur,” Dina has one Stranger Genius Award and three Seattle Times Footlight Awards, plus she has a huge, vocal fan in longtime troublemaking provocateur John Waters. (To wit, Dina would fit right into the ensemble of, say, 1974’s Female Trouble.) All of this tracks, as what first appears to be weird performance gaffes, fumbling malapropisms, and non sequiturs become the central point and drawing factors of the show. Aggressive mischief, seemingly free-associative comedy, and fever dream imagery; what a stocking stuffer.
